Between Selfies and Silence; Fiona Apple Sings, Joan Didion Rests, & I Ponder the Inevitability of Endings
I'm good at being uncomfortable, so I can't stop changing all the time.
Dearhearts,
Did you know that I don’t take selfies much anymore? Me, the queen of selfies! It’s almost unfathomable. It’s been a long time since I took one with any intention. Even longer since I’ve shared an image of myself with the world. Maybe because it’s hard to know how to honestly capture someone you don’t really know yet. And it appears that once again I’m feeling a bit of a stranger to myself.
No, that’s not quite right. That was then. This is now. And it’s different this time. Let me try to explain.
This is a space not yet given language and one that resists meaning-making and attempts to capture. But here’s the best way I can say it. I am not at all who I was (though I keep forgetting that and banging fruitlessly on the door of my past, begging for reentry because damn, that gal was a badass and I really quite liked her). This time, I am not launching a rescue expedition to find her and bring her back.
I am also not yet who I will eventually be. I am residing in the in-betweens, and those in-betweens—even when you attempt to capture them—often look like a ghostly apparition, a vintage film camera double exposure. Neither here nor there. Neither one thing nor fully the other.
Liminial spaces? I think these may be just a part of the human condition. Or, at least, they are certainly a part of MY human condition. Or maybe just the human condition for anyone who frustratingly insists on living in a constant process of evolution.
Fiona Apple repeats in my head as I attempt to do justice to what I feel. She croons, “But I'm good at being uncomfortable, so I can't stop changing all the time”, just as she has crooned in my ear for a few decades now. Anytime I need a reminder that I can find steady ground even when it’s shaking beneath my feet, Fiona delivers.
It’s true, sometimes we don’t need to search for new words to say what has already been perfectly said. All good writers learn this eventually.
You see, it used to be that I wrote extensively about these transformations. Mined them for all they were worth, carefully extracted every drop of wisdom or lesson or definitive, and held them for safekeeping, a record of the experience of getting lost and then found. A step-by-step guide, an instructional manual for self-reclamation. I called it dropping breadcrumbs. Taught others how those word clues would help us all Hansel and Gretel our way back, take us safely away from the witch’s cottage. Birds don’t eat words the way they eat bread, you know? These breadcrumbs can always be found again and can be relied on to guide us all the way back from whence we came.
But this time? This time I arrived at the inconvenient reality that there wasn’t an old self to go back to, no safe home at the end of the path, no lighthouse guilding the way, The me that I had been no longer existed, and thus, the painstakingly placed and recorded signposts led to precisely nowhere. An empty clearing in the center of a dark wood, not a single answer to be found, just a labyrinth with paths leading in different directions, no indication of which would get me to where I was going or even where the fuck that was. And so onward it was. I guess. I suppose. If I must. Surely I’ll stumble in the right direction soon.
However, so many months later, I still seem to be in between selves. Eventually, I decided to rest. To pause the desperate search for an answer, an antidote, a plan. I returned to that clearing, sat in lotus, closed my eyes, and decided that as awful and horrible and sad as this felt, maybe the rules were different this time. Maybe I hadn’t yet lived enough and learned enough to find the next me. Maybe this time, she would come find me and hold my hand. Maybe, I just couldn’t see the entire map yet. Needing to hold this much trust in an unknown and unfamiliar process is more than a little disconcerting. I have a feeling that you dear reader, of all people, know exactly what I’m talking about.
While we are sitting here, can I tell you a little story? Did you know that once upon a time, someone shared my writing with Joan Didion? Yes. THE Joan Didion. Let that one sink in for a little. Someone slipped MY words right into her birthday card, can you imagine? I never knew Joan, of course, but here we were, only separated by one degree of connection. That—to date—is the highlight of my literary career. I’d consider that maybe a little pathetic, as I do not even know if Joan read those words of mine, or maybe read them and hated them, or (perhaps worst of all) read a few lines and considered the rest garbage and not quite worth her time. But whatever the reality, someone considered my work worthy of sending to the patron saint of sentences herself, and if that ain’t something to hold on to during a dark night of the soul, I don’t know what is.
So, I keep writing. Because I’m not really sure what else I would do or who else I would become, and that feels more than a little unnerving. I am a writer. I write. Surely, out of all the uncertainties of life, that is one reliable truth. I thought it was.
Only, last year I stopped writing out of the blue. After 23 years of writing for the public, I just stopped. There are plenty of reasons for that (reasons that are hard and sad and traumatic and confusing and exhausting and mysterious and ultimately beautiful and deep and true). When the words first evaded me, I thought “Maybe I just have not experienced enough of this story to write of it yet. “Maybe it’s too soon and too tender to be fed into the ravenous writer brain that insists on making meaning of a thing before the meaning is truly ready to be made” I first referred to this space of no words as a short writing break and then it became a prolonged pause. Now that ten months have passed and there has been healing and repair and amends and growth and evolution, I’m not sure what to call it. I just know that once I stopped, I couldn’t seem to start again. The absence of the words hurt like a toothache that didn’t ever go away, but still, I didn’t really want to start again.
Until I sat down to write this rambling stream-of-consciousness letter, the muse had pretty much left me in peace(ish), moving on—as she does—to greener pastures and more willing subjects. All of this to say, without the constant flow of words I have not been sure who I am or what I am doing. I’ve just been uncomfortably existing, just like Fiona, waiting for the change that must eventually come.
This brings us back to those damn selfies (trust me, it does). The thing is, it can be really hard to capture the true essence of someone you don’t fully know or understand. You can do it, but the photos will be missing a certain indescribable something. That presence and energy and raw eye contact that says “This is me.” It turns out some liminalities are not interested in being captured or described or forced into meaning before they are damn well good and ready. Some words won’t be written until they have mysteriously alchemized enough to spill on the page, our own timelines and desires be damned. And so, here I am, existing without a public face for the first time in over two decades, and what a wild kinda trip that turns out to be.
My therapist asked me a while back how I would feel if the words never came back. I just looked at her, all slow blink and furrowed brow, and didn’t have a single thing to say in response. This was a hypothetical that I could not fathom or find a frame of reference for. What would the rest of my life be without a story to anchor it? Would I just one day go up in a cloud of smoke and disperse across the sky as if I had never been?
As Joan said, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear". I wrote to make sense of it all. And so without writing to help process and move through the endless questions, I’ve been spending a lot of time in a deep state of pondering. A lot of this lost-inside-the-cavernous-void-that-is-my-own-brain time has been dwelling on the inevitable end of things. The end of a writing career (at least one phase of it), the eventual end of active parenting, The end of relationships and income streams and belief systems. And yes, the end of life.
There is cause to think about this all now, more than I did in the before times. I am 48 years old. They call this middle age, but really it’s past the middle, most likely, most certainly, really. I’m surely past the middle of my strongest, my sharpest, my fastest self. Things ache that never ached before. Recovery is slower. My body is reluctant. My brain is more forgetful. My life is much smaller than it has ever been. To call closing in on 50 the middle of my lifespan presumes that most of us 70s and 80s babies fumbling around—still trying to figure out what the ever living fuck is going on here—will make it to 100. Clearly, most of us will not (would we even want to?).
I’ve got 30 good to decent years left, if I’m lucky, before shit starts to go way downhill, Or at least until the pace of inevitable descent accelerates so as to be impossible to ignore. I’m not saying I’m old, or that no more good is coming, or that all possibility is lost (if you need a reminder of all the potential that remains, watch this video). But suddenly, it really doesn’t seem like I have a whole lot of years left to meander around not getting done what wants to get done.
So, despite the reluctance and the uncertainty and the general sense of cluelessness I feel, here I am—after nearly a year away—attempting to write something. Because I don’t have a sweet clue when my time is up or what happens to me after this life is over. But even if it’s nothing and my consciousness and all that it contained is simply no more, I do hope that everything of me dissipates and transforms into the all and the nothing that invisibly surrounds us in a way that makes some impact.
I hope every last word I ever wrote is lifted off the page and held gently in the beak of each of the 200 million starlings who fly south each winter. And I hope they scatter those words like seeds all over the world, little language babies nestling into the soil and pushing up to the sun, ready to become all the books I never managed to write.
I hope the energy that was, for a short time, housed in my finite human body carries with it echoes of grace and gratitude, of moxie and mayhem, of mystery and magic. Echoes that make their way to the desert canons and let their whispers rise to a repeated roar that calls the coyotes to take up a singular howl and then lulls them all to sleep under the wildest full moon you ever did see.
All this, it seems, is good reason to try to straighten myself out here and now because of course, I have no idea when the mysterious after or the nothing else will come for me. No idea when I will become little more than words and energy and the memories of those who loved me. I hope I become little pinpricks of cosmos, all the stardust and ocean water that created me becoming some other unnameable something else, lighting up the night sky and shimmering in the deep.
At some point, there will be no more time left to start writing again.
[Side Note: This brings me to another thought. I really believe, after all this time, evolution could have figured out a better way to make these bodies and brains last. To make harder teeth and more resilient joints, To make a mind that only performs better the more it experiences. Hearts that don’t break down as they age but bounce back stronger from every heartache that has tried to take us out. I’m not sure that even evolution has a solution for the fact that everything is always moving in some irrevocable way toward its own expiry date. Even Darwin must have had to come to terms with that eventually. I wonder if he found it frustrating too. End Side Note]
So yes, circling back, I think this body has passed by its ‘best before’ date without me noticing, but I’m thinking maybe there’s a little life in me yet. And this, in turn, brings us back to Joan Didion (stay with me here), who—along with Anais and Virginia and a slew of others whose energy has already decided what to become-redefined for me what power language can hold when wielded with precision. I don’t imagine that I will create a canon of work that will take up as much space as theirs. I don’t know that my path includes becoming one of the great and revered mistresses of language, but I think that I am good.
I think that sometimes I write a line or two that is excellent, that has legs strong enough to stand on. That makes some sort of mysterious difference, even if it’s one I never get to know about. And maybe that actually brings us back to the selfies (yes, my brain always travels in circuitous routes) and to the original reason I began to take photos of myself way back when: to learn how to look at myself without looking away. To learn to see myself without flinching avoiding or diminishing what I saw. Maybe it’s the same with words. Maybe when I write, I practice stepping to the side to look at my own life as a kinder observer, a gentle witness. By being the one to wield the pen and craft the story of my own life, I hold the power to make it as big or small as it needs to be.
Who knows: maybe one day someone will be clearing through some random box that’s a part of Joan’s estate, and they will find that long-ago birthday card with the folded paper containing my very own words. And maybe those words will mean something to that someone right then, in that exact unpredictable moment, even if Joan never gave a damn. That would only happen because I took enough selfies and wrote enough words to see myself without needing to avert my own eyes, to allow myself to be seen by others. Without those practices, there isn’t any realistic way to imagine that my words could have made it into the hands of one of this country’s literary greats. There isn’t any way to imagine that I could have understood my own life sufficiently to write this entirely stream-of-consciousness love letter/essay.
So maybe I should take the damn selfies anyway, even if it feels odd to photograph myself as a stranger. And maybe I can find a way to start laying words on the page again after these, even if they feel all awkward and strange and weird and twisty, like a language I once spoke fluently but forgot to use. Without practice, my mouth and tongue do not remember how to make the specific shapes to form those specific sounds. The muscle memory is there, I know. And somehow and at some point, the writing will flow. Because even if my words did not and never will make an impact on Joan Didion, I know for certain those words have made an impact in this world and that even the smallest ripples have the power to move the ocean.
I kinda think that’s the whole entire point, isn’t it? To create something that means something to a singular being in a singular moment. Nothing more and nothing less. One person. One fragment of time. And then the next person and the next moment. And the next. And the next. Not grandiose. Not follower count. Not five-star reviews. Not bestseller lists.
Just me and my work (and whoever finds it and whenever it is found and whatever it does or not does not do from there). That’s it.
Because even if nobody ever reads a word of mine again, somehow, once upon a time they were sent to one of my writing heroes. And that, my dears, is a fact of stunning surprise and serendipity and enough. Even when the words feel far away. Even when I‘m not sure who I am or who I will be. It serves as a reminder that somehow, the work will find its way to me and then out into the world.. Backward or forward or through some twisty turn path. Or I will find my way to it. Because why else would I continue to be here?
I just have to trust the process. And trust myself, whoever she may be gathering the strength to become.
xo, lovelies.
jlb.
PS. Yes, I’ve been away, and I‘m not going to be premature and say that I’m back. But I’m here today, and today, just being here is enough.
What a lovely surprise to see you pop up today. With words! And they are just as touching and inspirational as ever. I love how you share your truth. No matter where you are in the ebb or flow of life’s mystery. You are a gift to all who search for clues about how and when to expand or let go of the vast questions! Xo
This is a stunning invocation of the in-between, not as a waiting room, but as a wilderness with its own strange gravity. Your refusal to sentimentalise the loss of self, your willingness to let the old you go without embalming her in nostalgia, is one of the most tender things a woman can do past 40. Because, let’s be honest, the world teaches us how to debut, not how to dissolve.
Maybe the new language we’re searching for isn’t verbal at all, not yet. Maybe it’s somatic. Cellular. Maybe the new self doesn’t arrive in words but in weather, barometric shifts in our being. The selfie, once an attempt at preservation, now feels like an intrusion on a body still mid-metamorphosis. Like photographing a chrysalis and calling it a butterfly.
Can we also talk about how evolution gave us skin that bruises easier with age, but hearts that hold more complexity, not less? And how maybe that is the exchange: less collagen, more capacity for contradiction. You write like someone who has survived her own myth. Who now knows that breadcrumbs aren’t meant to get you back, they’re a trail for someone else, some future version of you, or some reader in their own dark wood, clutching a lantern you lit without knowing it.
I hope your words do end up in a box in Joan Didion’s estate, wedged between her sunglasses and a matchbook from The Beverly Hills Hotel. But more than that, I hope they keep finding us, those of us not quite ready to selfie ourselves back into view. We don’t need mirrors when we have voices like yours showing us how to see again, Jeanette!